"Continued issues with the App Store approval process are prompting developers to shun the platform entirely. Though there are tens of thousands of other developers pumping out over 100000 iPhone apps, will continued migration away from iPhone development result in less quality software for the platform? Worse yet, will users even care?"

Actually, if you read the arstechnica article, there were three well known devs who recently decided they had enough. Apple treats its devs like crap. Thats just the way its going to be apparently.

Three out of how many? Look we all know there are issues with the approval process, some of them though are in reality unrealistic expectations from devs themselves. While I like the concept of market approval it simply cannot work. The iPhone is in too many countries and rogue apps could very easily in some of those countries wrack up a $50k bill for the user. While that user would certainly then be able to mod the app down it wouldn't fix their $50k bill.

WRT the approval process itself, there have been a lot of good suggestions made on fixing it, but again, have you ever tried to move a bulldozer with a toothpick? I really don't think Apple know how to fix this problem at the moment, and none of us really know if they even want to. Thom and Co will tell you it's their culture and they'll never change, others will stick their head in the sand and claim there is no problem while the sane people will realise that there is a problem but any fix for it will likely piss other people off anyway and will take quite some time to implement. If devs get the shits and leave in the mean time it's not going to make Apple cry or put any more resources into fixing the perceived problem than they already are, that's the way it is, get over it.

At the end of the day Devs will want to be where the market share is, we just have to look at Windows for that, and while Microsoft treat their devs pretty well these days it wasn't always the case...

The problem isn't that three left. Its that three professionals left. Out of all the people submitting apps, how many have what it takes to development a fit and polished piece of software versus a piece of junk.